ACQ Vol 13 no 3 2011

Cultural diversity

Oral narratives produced by Aboriginal Australian children: Dilemmas with normative comparisons Wendy Pearce and Emma Stockings

This study investigated the characteristics of oral narratives produced by six Aboriginal children aged between 6;6 and 9;6 years in North Queensland. Fictional narrative retellings were analysed at microstructure and macrostructure levels. Results were compared to the narrative story retell database included in the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts software. Most children gained lower results on measures of narrative microstructure, such as mean length of C-unit and number of different words, but performed well on several measures of narrative structure, namely the Narrative Scoring Scheme (NSS) total score and component scores for Introduction, Character Development and Conclusion. Older children performed within normal limits, or better, on more NSS measures than the younger children. Implications for the development of appropriate assessment measures for Aboriginal children are discussed. K ey findings of the Australian Early Development Index (AEDI), a national progress measure of early childhood development, revealed that the majority of Aboriginal children are developmentally on track in many domains, but not language and cognitive skills (Centre for Community Child Health and Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, 2009). This is a concern for speech pathologists who may be called on to assess children with suspected language delays. Currently, assessments used by Australian speech pathologists have not been standardised for Aboriginal children. As a result, accurate diagnosis of language impairment (LI) or differences (LD) arising from cultural and linguistic factors is difficult to achieve. Consequently, there is both an over- and underrepresentation of these students in special education (de Plevitz, 2006). Language sampling is often the assessment method of choice for children from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds (Munoz, Gillam, Peña, &

Gulley-Faehnle, 2003). It enables speech pathologists to adapt their interaction style to suit the child and avoid cultural challenges that may be present in standardised assessments. For example, in some Aboriginal communities display questions (asking the child to tell the examiner what the examiner already knows) are not a feature of traditional communicative practices (Moses & Wigglesworth, 2008). Language sample analysis (LSA) methods enable descriptive profiling of linguistic strengths and weaknesses by comparing measures from the child’s sample to what is known about typical development in the target population (Price, Hendricks, & Cook, 2010; Westerveld, Gillon, & Miller, 2004). Computerised LSA databases now make the task of normative comparisons much easier because the software will compute statistical comparisons between a child’s language sample and normative data from other children of the same age performing similar language tasks (Price et al., 2010). Australian speech pathologists are disadvantaged because existing normative data have typically been derived from overseas populations such as the US, UK, or NZ. While it is often assumed that English language development is similar across Australia, the USA, UK, and NZ, supportive evidence is scarce (see Westerveld, 2011). For example, a study of narrative retells from 39 Australian and 47 NZ children (5- and 6-years-old) found higher grammatical accuracy measures for the NZ children (Westerveld & Claessen, 2009). One discourse of diagnostic importance is oral narrative which acts as a vital medium for academic, social, linguistic, and cultural learning. Oral narrative is a universal cultural practice and an appropriate means for describing language development in children from many different cultures (Muñoz et al., 2003). Many narrative assessment measures are sensitive to both language development (Muñoz et al., 2003; Petersen, Gillam, & Gillam, 2008) and impairment (Epstein & Phillips, 2009; Fey, Catts, Proctor-Williams, Tomblin, & Zhang, 2004; Pearce, James, & McCormack, 2010). Children’s oral narratives are typically analysed at two levels, namely microstructure and macrostructure, as difficulties may be evident at both levels. Microstructure analyses primarily focus on children’s linguistic form and content (Heilmann, Miller, Nockerts, & Dunaway, 2010). Measures that reflect both productivity and complexity include the number of communication units (C-units; each independent clause and its dependents, and phrasal or single word utterances), mean length of C-units (MLCU), number of different words (NDW), and grammatical

Keywords ABORIGINAL CHILDREN CULTURAL AND

LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY DIAGNOSIS LANGUAGE DIFFERENCE ORAL NARRATIVE

This article has been peer- reviewed

Wendy Pearce (top) and Emma Stockings

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ACQ Volume 13, Number 3 2011

ACQ uiring Knowledge in Speech, Language and Hearing